Does anyone know the Metal system requirements?

Does anyone know the Metal system requirements? They're probably in some dev notes somewhere, but I'm having trouble navigating the new layout from my phone.

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If Metal has requirements separate from El Capitan itself (which would seem reasonable to some degree), they don't seem to be listed anywhere; neither the Metal framework documentation nor the OS X 10.11 release notes mention any separate requirements.

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If Metal has requirements separate from El Capitan itself (which would seem reasonable to some degree), they don't seem to be listed anywhere; neither the Metal framework documentation nor the OS X 10.11 release notes mention any separate requirements.

Yeah, I can't find any either. Thanks for looking. I guess I'll intall the 10.11 beta and see if I can run Metal code on the GTX 760 Ti in my 2008 Mac Pro.

In the Metal presentations at this year WWDC, they said that Metal will work on the 2012 computers, not earlier.

Well, I finally got around to installing the OS X 10.11 and Xcode 7 betas on my 2008 Mac Pro (which has a PC GTX 760 card), and the MetalKitEssentials sample code compiles and runs just fine. So thankfully Metal seems to rely on the actual video card, rather than some motherboard feature or an artificial cutoff.


I haven't tried it on my 2008 Macbook Pro, yet, but since I can't upgrade that video card, I doubt it'll do anything. I wonder what the behavior is when you try to run it on unsupported hardware?


Update: Yep, crashed at runtime on my 2008 MBP... The log says that newRenderPipelineStateWithDescriptor failed, which was then used to create a (presumably) invalid MTKMeshBufferAllocator, which then caused [[MDLAsset alloc] "initWithStuff"] to throw an exc_bad_access error.